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| Name | Prakash Kumar |
| Academic title(s) | Associate Professor |
| Institute | Pennsylvania State University |
| Department | History |
| Function | professor and researcher |
| Address | 108 Weaver, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University |
| Zip code | 16802 |
| Country | |
| Visible Email Address | |
| Short biography | Prakash Kumar is Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. He is a specialist of South Asian history with interest in science and technology, colonial history, development, and agrarian and rural modernization. His first book, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2012), complicates the history of colonial “improvement” by examining global knowledge flows and colonial science on the indigo plantations established by European planters in colonial India. It examines the claims of the planters that “natural” indigo made on plantations was superior to the cheaper and purer synthetic indigo launched on the international markets in 1899. He is currently working on his second monograph project that examines American projects of agrarian and rural modernization in India in the second half of the twentieth century. This book illustrates the contested territory of modernization in India by examining American archives of intervention and the playing out of tensions in execution of community development programs, pursuit of extractive agricultural practices, in food aid and public distribution systems, an epistemic community in which ideas of yield enhancement struck roots, and in rural-urban continuums. He has published widely in history journals including Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Technology and Culture, Agricultural History, South Asia, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. His research has been supported twice by Scholar Awards by the National Science Foundation. In 2020-21, he will be the United States Fulbright Scholar in India. |
| Recent publications | “Introduction: Seeds and the History of Science,” Editor, Focus Section on Seeds, Isis, Vol. 113, Issue 3 (September 2022). “The Development of Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University,” In Harald Fischer-Tine & Nico Slate (eds). Indo-Us Entanglements from the Age of Empire to Decolonisation, Leiden: Leiden University Press (forthcoming 2022). “American Modernizers and the Cow Question in Colonial and Nationalist India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2021): 185-200. “ “Modernization” and Agrarian Development in India, 1912-52,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 79, No. 3 (August) 2020: 633-658. “Agricultural History and Agrarian Studies,” Agricultural History, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Fall 2019): 716-717. “Introduction,” Technology and Culture, Special Issue on South Asia, Vol. 60, No. 4 (October 2019): 933-952. “A Big Machine Not Working Properly”: Elite Narratives of India’s Community Projects, 1952-58” – Technology and Culture, Special Issue on South Asia, Vol. 60, No. 4 (October 2019): 1027-58. “Modalities of Modernization: American Technic in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” In How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, edited by John Krige, 120-148. University of Chicago Press, 2019. “Decolonizing Science in Asia,” Verge, 4, No. 1 (2018): 24-43. (co-author) “Roundtable: New Narratives of the Green Revolution,” Agricultural History, 91 No. 3 (Summer 2017): 397-422. (co-author) “Plantation Indigo and Synthetic Indigo: Redefinition of a Colonial Commodity,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58: 2 (April 2016): 407-31. “GENEALOGIES – Connecting Spaces in Historical Studies of the Global,” in Hilary Kahn (ed.), Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, pp, 97-111. “Transnational Knowledge and Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 48 No. 3 (2014): 720-53. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. “Plantation Science: Improving Natural Indigo in Colonial India, 1860-1913,” Winning entry, Special Commendation, Singer Prize, British Journal for the History of Science, 40: 4 (December, 2007): 537-565. “Scientific Experiments in British India: Indigo Planters, Scientists, and the State, 1890-1930,” in Indian Economic and Social History Review, 38:3 (June-September, 2001): 249-270. |
| Role in Tensions of Europe | |
| Research interests | |
| Additional research interests | agricultural history, history of science, colonial and post-colonial science, US-India relations, Development and Modernization |